Saturday, March 31, 2007

Blast from the Past

There are familiar forms of selfrighteousness in which people become so suffused with the virtue of their cause that they cease to care about intellectual honesty. Dr. Chomsky, I fear, has succumbed to this malady of moralism.

Read the whole thing, as they say. Historians' prose is like whiskey: It can be so harsh it makes you cringe, or it can be smooth and sweet. Schlesinger always was the latter. A Chomsky take-down requires detailed drudgery, but with Schlesinger's touch, this is likely to be one of the better ones you'll ever read, even though it's almost as old as I am.